Have you ever heard of recovering from Google’s Panda with manual work? I’m not referring to the blue collar job which makes most people sweat. What I’m talking about is the step by step process that involves the identification, recording and action you take to make your website clean of everything that Panda hates. But just like a blue collar job, this manual Google Panda recovery can be time consuming and energy draining. So, prepare yourself for it.
Getting Started
For a start, create a spreadsheet and record in it everything – from the extent of the damage to your plan of action. Mark the pages hit most, ones that seem to be doing okay, and so on – then add what you’re going to do to fix it. This will allow you track and manage your recovery process.
Think Of The Penguin Update First
In order to bounce back from the Panda kick, you also need to consider the effects of the Penguin algorithm update released earlier. And that means you should also focus on removing all the links that are causing the penalties. Yes, you read that right – all the links. Google is now sharper in evaluating the quality of all the links in the web. When Google spots the presence of ‘unnatural’ links and backlinks connected to your website, it will automatically arrest the issue right there and then and send you a message about it.
You’ll need to work hard for your site to survive.
Link Removal
First of all, you can ask website owners to remove a link or multiple of links which are connected to your website. Remember to be polite when doing these requests. Website owners get easily offended by such requests especially when they believe their websites to be good and not ‘spammy’. I mean really, no one likes being called spam.
Taking down bad links this way requires considerable time and effort. Also, you may not be able to contact all site owners. If there are too many links to remove and sites to contact, opting for a link removal service would be a better option.
Google expects at least 70 percent of the bad links removed. If you have achieved such percentage, submit a re-inclusion request to Google. Although I don’t want to be negative, just expect multiple rejections, but keep trying and trying… Your patience will pay off when you finally get Google’s positive reply.
Now, Let’s Beat The Panda!
To make sure your website can recover from Panda, your website must:
1) Provide excellent user experience – This highlights the design lay out and performance of your website. Evaluate whether it’s easy for visitors to navigate through your entire site. Check out also whether your website loads fast.
2) Have content not ads. A website full of ads with little to no content is a big “no-no” in Google land. Make sure your pages have good quality of content on them, and don’t overdo the on-page ads.
3) Provide quality content over quantity content – If your website has authoritative content which people find useful to read, Google would see it as link worthy.
4) Have no low quality duplicate pages on the loose. Make sure you don’t have a bunch of pages out there with the same content on them – Google will see you’re just trying to spam the internet so will discount them and your website.
5) Be rich with keywords that are helpful to users and not just for SEO purposes. This is really about giving users what they’re after – if everything you do is “user first” and SEO second – then you’ll more than likely be doing the right thing.
As you can see, manual Google Panda recovery can be very difficult. So if you’re both skills poor and time poor, the manual recovery option might not be the best use of your time. So why not get someone else to do all the hard work for you? My team can help you bounce back from the Panda update. Click here to get started.